Can't save my contacts in the SIM card

Using /e/OS Applications
1

Hi,

as a title show, why I can’t save my contacts in the SIM card?
The Only possibility that OS offer to me is in the smartphone. Are there any solution?

Many thanks.

Regain your privacy! Adopt /e/ the unGoogled mobile OS and online servicesphone

2

This is a known problem. You can find more infos about this on the issue-tracker: https://gitlab.e.foundation/e/backlog/-/issues/191

2 Likes
3

Thank for the reply.

So, solution is export contacts and save a new .vcf file if I don’t want to use a could system.

4

Hello.

There’s apps witch can. For example:

Dumbphone Assistant - https://f-droid.org/packages/com.github.yeriomin.dumbphoneassistant

.
.
Édith : Android One (full updated) doesn’t allow to export contacts to SIM card…

5

Thank you trefix.

I installed Dumbphone App, but does not show my contatc in the SIM card. If I try to copy my phone contacts into the SIM card, App tell me that it’s impossible (maybe because SIM card is full).
It seem to me that in fact contacts are in the SIM (previously, when in the smartphone it was Android, I had a copy of my contacts both in SIM card and phone).

6

Perhaps it would be a solution to save the vcf-file where the Contacs app wants it and then you move it using a so called file manager to the place where you want it to have, hm?

8

Thank you.

How can I find file path where the Contacts App save the .vcf?

9

When you do an export of the contacts the Contacts app asks (!) you where to save the vcf file. You can put it whereever you want, I can on my phone even select a folder on the SD card, this means it’s not generally impossible.

10

Reading/writing to a SIM card requires a hardware capability that used to exist in the first generations of smartphones (when people were migrating from dumb- and feature-phones to smartphones and cloud contacts storage), but has been taken away (as a cost-saving measure, I guess) for several years now (very quietly).

So I you really need to update your SIM card contacts, you best bet IMO is to :

  1. Get an old device. I’m talking Android 4-era.
  2. Use Dumbphone Assisant, as @trefix advised.

BTW, should you need such a device, I have a Samsung Pocket 2 for sale. ^^

EDIT :
Dumbphone Assistant is actually based on a work dating back to 2010, at the time of Android 2…

2 Likes
11

Ok, I think best solution is to continue to save .vcf file in usb storage from time to time.

12

It’s not true that the capability to read and write contacts to SIM doesn’t exist anymore in regular smartphones. I have a Xiaomi Redmi 7A running MIUI 12 and stock Android 10 and it can do both with no glitch. I lets me choose whether to store in the phone, in the SIM or in the cloud; it even lets me display or hide contacts on the fly according to their storage, and import them in mass from SIM to phone and viceversa.
Apparently /e/OS can’t do that because the capability has been removed in LineageOS, which I can’t understand, because the app that does all this in the Redmi is not from Xiaomi or Google but seems to be the default com.android.contacts. Isn’t this AOSP? Why would LOS remove a feature from AOSP?
I can confirm that the Dumbphone app cannot read the SIM in /e/OS Q, so I had to put the card into the Redmi and export the contacts to a vCard (.vcf) file.
I sorely miss this ability to move my SIM card and my contacts from one phone to another without depending on a cloud.

13

Only having an import function to the phone is the Android default for a long time now as far as I’ve seen, so I doubt LineageOS removed anything in that regard.

If vendor-specific OSes still have the export feature to the SIM card, then the vendors have put effort into putting it back into their OSes themselves.

14

I see. Just now I realized that the default Contacts app has the option to import from SIM, but to write to SIM you need Dumbphone Assistant in both LOS or eOS.

And yet Dumbphone Assistant behaves in strange ways. On my Sony Xperia Tablet Z LTE (running an old unofficial LineageOS 16) it does detect the SIM contacts, but on my Samsung Galaxy S9 it doesn’t.

15

Seems to me there’s no real reason for the missing possibility to save contacts on SIM cards. I cannot find any hint in Google Android’s release notes that this function is obsolete or that it has been abandoned. Also see developers reference, last updated in 2022: ContactsContract.SimContacts  |  Android Developers

Not offering a possiblility to save contacts on SIM card, is quite a setback. After all most people keep their SIM when they get a new phone.